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It’s absolutely amazing how wrong this administration has been when it comes to immigration enforcement. That some people still think the Supreme Court is in the best position to resolve this is insane. This isn’t a circuit split in need of mending. This is pretty much the entirety of the court system coming to the same conclusion.
You can look at this two ways: it’s either a resounding rejection of this administration’s anti-migrant actions or it’s evidence of the futility of the system of checks and balances. Either way, someone’s definitely keeping an eye on this and that someone is Kyle Cheney of Politico, who’s been tracking immigration-related lawsuits ever since Trump returned to office. Here’s the good news/bad news:
More than 10,000 times, judges have said those detentions, typically carried out with no opportunity for detainees to plead their case, were illegal. That’s roughly 90 percent of all cases — a staggering rejection of a core piece of Trump’s immigration agenda.
Trump’s unprecedented detention policy, which is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court, infuriated lower courts in ways no other modern issue has. It ruptured the relationship between the Justice Department and the judiciary; pitted the administration against itself; and upended innumerable lives — not just of the people swept up by immigration agents, but of their spouses and children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.
You’d think that 10,000 adverse rulings by judges whose appointments have spanned multiple administrations would clearly signal that the current administration’s actions are wrong. But that’s undercut by the opening of the second paragraph, which delivers the bad news no one who supports constitutional rights wants to hear.
This shouldn’t be headed to the Supreme Court — the court most likely to give Trump what he wants, no matter what that means for what’s left of our rights. Just because an extremely small minority of judges have ruled in favor of unjustified detentions doesn’t make it an unsettled matter of law. If we had something approaching 10,000 rulings in favor of this administration’s actions, that might mean we need someone to make the final call.
One way or another, it will end up there, if only because the Trump administration has the unlimited budget to ensure this happens. It can appeal every single one of these 10,000 adverse rulings in perpetuity because it doesn’t have to worry about keeping its lawyers paid. The plaintiffs in these cases, however, have to deal with private sector reality day in and day out and know the least sympathetic court in the land is also the most powerful.
The administration was given the chance to address this reality. And, of course, it chose to respond like a petulant child, rather than attempting to be the adult in the room:
Trump administration officials shrug off the one-sided rebuke from the courts, attributing their losses to “the left and their activist proxies on the judiciary” and predicting that they will prevail at the Supreme Court.
“The law is not a popularity contest among judges,” a Justice Department spokesperson said.
This response is insane. It’s one thing to respond to a judicial aberration with a partisan shrug. It’s quite another to pretend 10,000 rulings from more than 400 judges is nothing more than “judicial activism” by “the left.” Reality (and, hopefully, history) is not on the side of Trump. The only thing left for it to do is hope that the court Trump stacked is similarly willing to pretend thousands of adverse rulings are nothing more than liberals trying to impose their will on the nation.
Pretending is all this administration has. Behold this “activist proxy” of “the left:”
“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” wrote U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointee based in New York, in the case of a man whose lawful status was revoked after ICE arrested him. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”
What’s left of the DOJ is more beholden to Trump than his own judicial appointees. Anyone willing to speak on record does so with all the personal conviction of someone hoping to avoid the next political purge:
Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassare, asked about the more than 10,000 rulings against the administration, replied: “That’s great, now the American people can see how judges are putting personal policy preferences ahead of proper interpretations of the law.”
You know what the people are actually going to see? They’re going to see that this administration has repeatedly violated the law and is resorting to accusing Trump’s own judicial appointees of being partisan hacks. That’s not going to play well with people who actually pay attention to these things. And it won’t budge the needle at all with the Trump faithful who either can’t or won’t keep up with the autocratic overtures being pitched by their own personal Jesus.
Unfortunately, the Trump loyalists in the Supreme Court are just as willing to be deliberately ignorant of the law when the administration asks them to rule in its favor. We don’t expect average Americans to grasp the intricacies of decades of precedential rulings. But we should expect the nation’s highest court to comprehend that 400+ judges and 10,000+ rulings might add up to something it shouldn’t ignore, no matter how much the conservative majority might want to please the person they now seem to view as a king, rather than a president.
Filed Under: bigotry, constitutional rights, dhs, ice, mass deportation, mass detention, trump administration
Hey, if we have to be fair (and we don’t), we can trace some of this intranational movement to policies that predate the current shitshow we’re somehow expected to believe is the host to the Leader of the Free World.
A patchwork of marijuana legalization laws has led directly to law enforcement camping out on the borders of weed-friendly states, hoping to bust (but hoping even more to steal money from) people entering those states for the sole purpose of enjoying a substance that’s currently illegal in their own state.
After the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade was no longer good law, a new form of awfulness began. Law enforcement and local prosecutors starting arresting and bringing criminal charges against people who traveled to states where abortion was legal, rather than subject themselves to local laws outlawing their bodily autonomy.
It keeps getting worse. Florida has enacted new immigration laws that are even more draconian than Trump’s all-out war on anyone who looks less than full-on Caucasian. Those laws may have been blocked by courts, but that’s not stopping Florida from treating migrants entering the state like migrants illegally crossing US borders.
Florida, Texas, Idaho, New Hampshire: these are the main players in a recent article by The Guardian that details the experiences of people who find themselves refugees from their own former US states.
We’ll start with the story of a teacher who abandoned New Hampshire for Vermont because of the state’s efforts to erase critical race theory and other things that might inform students that white doesn’t always mean right.
John Dube, a high school teacher with 35 years of teaching under his belt, went up against local lawmakers’ attempts to ban CRT theory from being discussed in public schools. This put him in the crosshairs of far right activists, who engaged in a campaign of harassment so worrisome federal and local law enforcement stopped by to warn the teacher of what they had observed online..
The backlash was instant. Granite Grok, a local rightwing website, posted the names of all New Hampshire signatories, and within hours of that Dube received a Facebook message that read: “Whats up homo? I heard your teaching Marxist commie CRT in your classrooms. You can fuck right off you garbage human.”
Dube calmly replied that he would not be intimidated.
Within days, police officers turned up at his house, having been dispatched by the FBI. Dube’s name was circulating on obscure chatrooms frequented by violent militia members. He was urged to install security cameras at home, but when he asked why the police didn’t arrest the perpetrators of the threats, he was told that was impossible on free speech grounds.
So much for the “Live Free or Die” state. It’s now just the “Fuck Off and Die” state, heavily populated by people who believe your rights (and possibly, your life) end where their beliefs begin.
Dube has since relocated to Vermont to teach. He’s not the only one fleeing persecution and/or prosecution in his former home state due to legislation passed by Trump sycophant’s or the disturbing actions of those who support Trump and his rampant destruction of constitutional rights.
The Guardian article also tells the story of two women who left Idaho because of its draconian abortion ban. It’s not just women affected by the ban, though. The article points out two-thirds of Idaho’s fetal medicine specialists have left the state because continuing to provide the care they have for years puts them in danger of being prosecuted under the state’s abortion law.
And another person left Texas to protect their trans teen from harassment and prosecution enabled by the state’s many attacks on trans rights and LGBTQ+ speech. And it isn’t just the simple matter of relocating a family. “Sandra” (the pseudonym used by The Guardian to protect this parent from prosecution or harassment) also had to shut their business and somehow hope it can continue to provide income for their family when (or if) they manage to re-open it.
There are more anecdotes in the Guardian article, ranging from people leaving California to escape wild fires President Trump refuses to provide aid to fight or protect against to pulling up stakes to avoid being subjected to censorship efforts that target not only what content students have access to in libraries to what they’re able to learn about while in class.
If you choose to believe this is nothing more than a few people over-reacting to local policies, you are, of course, free to continue entertaining this delusion. But this is something we simply don’t expect to be happening in the United States. Sure, some people may move to find better schools or better jobs, but they rarely pull up stakes because they feel they’re local government poses a tangible, ongoing threat to their beliefs, rights, and ongoing existence.
And don’t even pretend there aren’t a lot of legislators and state leaders secretly wishing they could just throw up Berlin Walls on their borders to prevent people who disagree with their politics from seeking somewhere else to live. This is all about control of everyone, not just those who simply adore the cool touch of a boot heel to their neck. They want the people who reject their impositions to suffer the most.
Florida has already tried to create a virtual border within the United States with its law that creates new criminal charges for any undocumented immigrant entering Florida from another state. Drug warriors have long pretended the US isn’t contiguous when it comes to selective enforcement of drug laws. And as long as cops and prosecutors are trying to hunt down scofflaws who leave the state to partake of legal goods and services offered in other states, there will always be a latent desire to set up “papers, please” checkpoints on state borders. The only difference now is there are people in power who are willing to explore that option.
Filed Under: bigotry, constitutional rights, donald trump, endless parade of dipshits, florida, idaho, immigration, new hampshire, republicans, texas
Anyone paying attention to the first Trump term (and who wasn’t?) saw the latent threat to democracy buried only slightly beneath the bluster and spray-on tan. Here was a man who spent years building a mythology that presented him as the ultimate deal maker, when the reality showed he was just a guy who spent his dad’s money to get a bit richer, leaving behind him a long, slimy trail of bankruptcies, lawsuit settlements, and countless sexual harassment allegations.
After he and his MAGA death cult delivered hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths during the COVID pandemic by fighting mask mandates and touting everything from bleach to horse de-wormers as possible cures (anything but a vaccine!), he finished up his first term by claiming the election was stolen and standing idly by while his supporters assaulted cops and raided the Capitol building.
Many of us felt this wouldn’t happen twice. Surely no one would fall for this a second time, not after it had been made abundantly clear Donald Trump mistook being president as being king, and resented everything about the system that had elevated him because this system made him replaceable.
But it did happen again. And this time it’s much, much worse. Trump may not have learned anything (he still seems to feel he’s more king than president), but the people around him certainly did. If the system not only guarantees you’re replaceable every 2-4 years, but is built from the ground up to rein in the Executive Office so it doesn’t become a throne room, then the system itself must go.
Hence the creation of DOGE, a government agency that’s predicated on the lie that it’s there to reduce fraud and waste, rather than just eliminate anything and anyone that stands in the way of the president and his desires. Hence the executive order carpet-bombing by Trump, which is has been carried out solely for the purpose of creating so many battlefronts that it’s impossible for opponents to rally forces effectively.
But even if you’re one of those self-deluding people who think electing Trump was better for the economy or the only way to address the so-called “border crisis,” you can only lie to yourself for so long. You need to admit you prefer living in a cheap American knockoff of long-established autocratic superpowers and that you don’t really care about “freedom” because that term is going to become a historical relic in the near future.
It’s not just the vibes, though. It’s also the data. It’s the collation of people’s ideals, as self-identified by survey and poll respondents, as well as the perceptions of what’s going on here in the US by people living elsewhere in the world. This current iteration of the Republican party has blown past the extremes displayed by far-right groups in European countries. It’s now so far out of the accepted boundaries for “free world” nations that it’s becoming the very thing so many US military veterans fought against over the past 100+ years.
The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch has taken a long look at the data and arrived at a truly disturbing conclusion:
Every five to 10 years, the World Values Survey asks hundreds of questions of people in dozens of countries, in an attempt to quantify differences in the culture, norms and beliefs of people in different societies.
Usually, analysis is done at national level, but by drilling down to different political parties in the latest raw data, I find that on everything from attitudes towards international co-operation, to appetite for an autocratic leadership style, through to trust in institutions and inward- vs outward-looking mindset, Trump’s America is a stark outlier from western Europe and the rest of the Anglosphere. In many cases, the Maga mindset is much closer to that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.
Yes, many of us will find this conclusion obvious. But the fact that it’s easily observable by people who haven’t been MAGA-blinded doesn’t mean it will be easy to reset to the norms after Trump leaves office (if he ever does…). The decline towards autocracy actually began in earnest shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, as you can see in Burn-Murdoch’s graph. Barring a slight uptick back to the center during Barack Obama’s first term, American ideals have been in a steady, if slightly-slower decline since 2012.
The marked difference here is how fast this descent is. And the fact that it’s so readily apparent from the administration’s overt attack on the other two branches of government makes it clear that the point of no return is probably reachable within the next four years. There’s no irony in the fact that the party that claims it values freedom above all else is moving quickly to curtail it. Instead, it’s just Trump and his loyalists saying the quiet part out loud through mandates, actions, and assuring the autocrats this party emulates that the Republican party has got their back, even if it means subjecting millions of people to decades of oppression or tanking the same economy they promised they’d revive.
It would be easy to sit back and let the MAGA faithful discover the awfulness of what they’ve unleashed. Unfortunately for those who aren’t in that group, it’s highly unlikely they’ll be the first against the wall.
Filed Under: china, constitutional rights, donald trump, freedom, maga, russia, turkey
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